The Aztecs smoked a hollow reed or cane tube stuffed with tobacco. Other natives of Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America crushed tobacco leaves and rolled the shreds in corn (maize) husk or other vegetable wrappers. The first European to discover smoking was Christopher Columbus.
In 1492 Christopher Columbus and his crew returned to Europe from the Americas with the first tobacco leaves and seeds ever seen on the continent. A crew member, Rodrigo de Jerez, was seen smoking and imprisoned by the Inquisition, which believed he was possessed by the devil. Almost from the outset, smoking was described as an evil and harmful practice by the Europeans but it seems that spiritual revulsion and danger to health have never been sufficiently long-lasting to prevent people from engaging in tobacco use.
Early in the 16th century beggars in Sevilla (Seville) began to pick up discarded cigar butts, shred them, and roll them in scraps of paper (Spanish papeletes) for smoking, thus improvising the first cigarettes. These poor man’s smokes were known as cigarrillos (Spanish: “little cigars”).
Early 1500s in Middle East, tobacco was introduced when the Turks took it to Egypt. In 1531 tobacco was cultivated for the first time in Europe (at Santo Domingo). By 1600 tobacco use had spread across Europe and England and was being used as a monetary standard, a practice that continued throughout the following century.
A Frenchman named Jean Nicot (from whose name the word nicotine derives) introduced tobacco to France in 1560 from Portugal. From there, it spread to England. The first report of a smoking Englishman is of a sailor in Bristol in 1556, seen "emitting smoke from his nostrils".
By the end of the 16th century, tobacco use had became a custom among fashionable people in Europe and tobacco was being exported to India, China, and Japan.
Late in the 18th century they acquired respectability and their use spread to Italy and Portugal; they were carried by Portuguese traders to the Levant and Russia. French and British troops in the Napoleonic Wars became familiar with them; the French named them cigarettes.
Cigarettes were first introduced in the United States in the early 19th century. Before this, tobacco was used primarily in pipes and cigars, by chewing, and in snuff.
By the time of the Civil War, cigarette use had become more popular. Federal tax was first imposed on cigarettes in 1864. Shortly afterwards, the development of the cigarette manufacturing industry led to their quickly becoming a major U.S. tobacco product.
Cigarette making machines were developed in the latter half of the 1800s. The first such machines produced about 200 cigarettes per minute.
History of cigarettes
